Sound and music have always been a big part of Wang Ye’s life, guiding him through a career that has spanned being a research engineer at Nokia in Finland to an associate professor at NUS’s School of Computing. “Everybody, including myself, likes music,” says Wang, who leads the Sound and Music Computing Lab.

In the summer of 1983, the government organisation Atomic Energy of Canada Limited launched its newest radiation therapy machine. The Therac-25 was highly anticipated — it boasted a revolutionary dual treatment mode (employing either a powerful electron beam or X-rays to kill cancer cells), was more compact than its predecessors, and could be controlled entirely by a computer.

The past few years have been a mixed bag for facial recognition. In 2017, the technology stepped into the global spotlight as Apple launched the iPhone X — its first smartphone to rely on face, rather than fingerprint, scanning for authentication.

When Covid-19 came barrelling through the world, it upended nearly every aspect of our lives, forcing us to live, work, and play in completely new ways. We became accustomed to things we previously held off as a last resort or long resisted — things like face masks, Zoom, and having our movements monitored.